The above headline is false. It is NOT true. That would be forced communism
which everyone knows is disasterous economically. That headline was
for trolling purposes to attract more attention.

Ok, the same is true of the currency industry. There is no good practical,
philosophical, moral or religious reason for the State to own or control the currency industry.
The food, clothing, shelter and currency industries are too important for the State
to assume ownership and/or control.

Here is what was on savethemales.ca a few days ago until it got bumped off:

--------------------------------------------------
Dear Alisha,
We need to abolish the private control of credit and bring it under government control. This isn't likely to happen since politicians, the media, academics are all bought and paid for.

Henry

--------------------------------------------------

Now here is what the correct economic liberty view is:

Imagine a clothing industry in Canada run by a single
private corporation which was granted a government enFORCED monopoly.
This is an example of fascism ( private ownership and State control ).
There are always all kinds of inefficiencies and corruption in this setup.

Now imagine a solution proposed for this clothing industry which
is for the government to run the clothing system. This is an example
of enforced communism ( State ownership and State control )
There are also all kinds of inefficiencies and corruption in this setup.

Now the correct solution for all the problems in the clothing industry
would be to have economic liberty. In other words competition amongst
many suppliers, freedom of entry into the business and freedom
by customers to choose and trade with any supplier.

Again, having one private corporation with a state granted monopoly over an industry,
enforced by state gunpower is NOT a free-enterprise system. That is fascism.

So also, just apply the above logic to the "currency" industry
( credit is just a derivative of a currency ) and that's that - you have
your solution to the 1001 issues and controversies in the money industry.
The correct solution for all the problems in the currency industry
would be to have economic liberty. In other words competition amongst
many currency suppliers, freedom of entry into the currency business and freedom
by customers to choose and trade with any supplier.

In fact currency inflation would be practically eliminated and the prices
of all goods and services would FALL each year by the rate of
productivity increase, say 3% a year on average ( get your calculators
out and see how much a new car "should" cost now compared to
the year you were born in ).

And don't believe state university propaganda that a free market in currencies
was tried 150 years ago and it didn't work. The free market HAS worked 9,999
times/industries in a row and it would work here also. If the police previously did a poor job
of catching and prosecuting for fraud or counterfeiting then
that is an indictment of the inefficiency of the
State's police.

The only function of the State in the above scenarios would be to recieve a 911 call
from a business saying that a robber had just stolen clothes or
a criminal had just counterfeited currency.

I apologise if I misunderstood the meaning of the word "control"
in the savethemales.ca piece. It might not mean "own".
Alternatively if I am right it goes to
show you that even the smartest people can be incorrect about some issues.

I had previously written a better piece than this but when I hit "submit"
it disappeared. So this will have to do now. That is not the first time I had spent a decent interval of time composing a statement and then lost it in the clubconspiracy site ether.

Okay Rush, I'll bite. I saw Henry's response as well. THE problem is criminality. Any system is open to abuse, in this case by 'banksters'.

In theory, 'government' can be monitored by the masses and turfed out at regular intervals when they don't serve the public. If the Rockefellers could be voted out I'm sure they would.

In theory having government control the money is the best solution because it is the only one that CAN work, IF we had a democracy.

I suspect that your economic liberty model could be open to criminality. One way to look at the government control model is that it is not in place anywhere. Communism uses monopoly control private banking.

What the issue comes down to in my opinion is a public medium of exchange. A private medium of exchange could be barter or maybe some form of stock exchange. You could be advocating barter in this thread which might be a stronger argument.

Lets think of a public medium. Generally gov't regulates certain standards for simplicity and safety. Common voltages in houses for example. Now if the gov't screws up, the public gets angry, and sometimes good changes are made. The electricity blackout in North America 2 years ago might be an example of a public medium, of limited supply, that went screwy because of poor management. Government only had limited blame for the problem but fixes and adjustments have been made, things are marginally better now.

The same thing could happen for the supply of money/credit* in the economy. Gov’t could create and control the money supply to a minor or greater degree. That would mean advancing loans to businesses and homeowners…sort of like a bank does. It would work, the banks would be pissed, there’d be a lot of assassinations.

* I wouldn’t call that currency. Currency is like a unit or standard, like common house voltages. We have a system of private credit creation that collapses in on itself as time goes on. Because interest is charged on money that never existed in the first place we have inflation. If we could pay banks their interest in hogs or whatever, that would help.

Lets think of a public medium. Generally gov't regulates certain standards for simplicity and safety. Common voltages in houses for example. Now if the gov't screws up, the public gets angry, and sometimes good changes are made. The electricity blackout in North America 2 years ago might be an example of a public medium, of limited supply, that went screwy because of poor management. Government only had limited blame for the problem but fixes and adjustments have been made, things are marginally better now.
----------------------------------------------
rushdoony found and posted dat:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul121.html

Politics Is No Solution to the Blackout

by Rep. Ron Paul, MD

Last week’s blackout that paralyzed much of the northeast has politicians scrambling to assign blame and pledge action to fix the problem. The universal consensus is that government, specifically Congress, must immediately “do something.” As with most crises, the problem is instantly assumed to stem from a lack of government regulation.

Yet few industries are more regulated than the electricity industry. Power companies have become quasi-public entities; many are municipally owned. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and a slew of state and local agencies regulate every action they take. When a problem happens, however, nobody cries out for greater freedom in the electricity industry or condemns government for too much regulation.

It’s true that the nation’s power grids are inadequate for today’s needs, and that a relatively small overload in a vulnerable spot can create a huge problem. This is hardly an indictment of the free market, however, but rather an indictment of the stifling maze of government regulations that burden electricity producers. Energy bureaucrats, despite their attempts at centralized planning through production and price controls, can never hope to determine how much electricity should be produced, where it should be channeled, and at what prices it should be sold. The very complexity of the power grid, which resembles a spider web dotted by population centers, cries out for the economic cooperation that only the invisible hand of an unregulated market system can provide.

As economist Thomas DiLorenzo points out, the fundamental problem is government interference with supply in the electricity market. The nation’s population has risen dramatically in the last 30 years, causing a huge increase in demand for electricity. But supply has increased little if at all, thanks to environmentalists and land-use bureaucrats at both the state and federal levels. The Neo-Luddites, as DiLorenzo terms them, are adamantly against building new nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, and especially coal or natural gas-fired electric power plants. When demand grows without a corresponding increase in capacity, the entire electric grid becomes overloaded. Last week demonstrates that it doesn’t take much to tip the balance and crash the system over a large area.

Electricity, from coal-burning sources or not, is likely to remain our primary form of power for decades. We simply need to accept this and build more electric power plants. In a free market, profit-seeking companies would be happy to build new plants and sell power to an ever-growing population. Unless and until government stops restricting supply and controlling prices, however, we can only expect the electric power system to remain vulnerable. It is precisely because electricity is so vitally important in our modern world that it should be delivered by the efficient free market, rather than the dismal bureaucratic sector. In this day and age, it is preposterous that we have problems delivering simple electric power where and when it is needed. The recent blackout cannot be blamed on technology or a lack of capital, and certainly not on a supposed market failure. The real problem – too much government regulation – is likely to be ignored as Congress rushes to engineer a wholesale federal takeover of the electricity industry.

There has been a long-standing conflict among Austrian economists about the nature of the best or most "freedom-consistent" banking system for a true laissez faire society. The issue is important because the two viewpoints are not merely differences of degree. Both sides invoke the same fundamental moral and economic principles, yet each comes out in opposition to the other.

How can this be? This article contends that it can't be - that there's a logical flaw at the base of both arguments, a very minor but logically critical one - and that actually both sides are right when the issue is restated in the proper terms.

To show this, let us first summarize both sides of the debate. The 100-percenters say that in a free society, force is outlawed, a statement both sides can endorse. Next, since fraud is a form of (implicit) force, it too must be banned. Since a fractional reserve system promises to pay specie in amounts greater than what actually exist, that promise is a fraud. Therefore, the 100-percenters contend, a fractional reserve banking system has no place in a free society.

The fractional reserve advocates, who disagree with the 100-percenters, also base their arguments on free market principles. In a free market, they say, anyone can do what he wants as long as he doesn't use force against others. This includes banks. If a bank issues notes that aren't 100 per cent backed by specie, by what right do we stop them? They aren't forcing people to accept the notes.

Notes of the less-well-backed banks will circulate at a bigger discount than notes that are more well backed. A promise to pay the bearer doesn't have to be backed 100 per cent at all times. Otherwise, a promissory note from an individual who had no gold, but who expected to be earning a gold paycheck in future weeks, would be just as guilty of fraud. That's obviously not the case, and yet, the fractional reserve advocates conclude, there is no difference in principle between an individual's un-backed promissory note and a bank's fractionally backed note.

In summary, the 100-percenters have shown that the fractional reservers are advocating fraud. The fractional reservers have shown that the 100-percenters advocate force (by legally prohibiting the freedom to issue partially backed notes). This is why the debate, while never really hitting the headlines, is such a serious one: from each side's view, the other side is guilty of a severe moral transgression.

Periodically the debate flares up, and each side reasserts its logically self-consistent argument. Neither side, however, refutes the other's argument. Finally, everyone throws up his hands in exasperation and the debate peters out once again. Each side tries to be cordial to the other, but, because such moral issues are involved, the debate has to be an obstacle to genuine goodwill between the two factions.

Having stated the problem, we now come to the resolution. The apparent contradiction arises out of a subtle fallacy, named "intellectual package dealing" by Ayn Rand. Besides accepting the same explicit moral principles, each side, unfortunately, has also accepted the same implicit "package deal."

A "package deal" is the inappropriate "packaging" of two or more different concepts under a single label. It can be used consciously to mislead, or unwittingly, causing confusion. In this case, two completely separate things are meant by the term "banking system," each of which, combined with the same set of free market principles, will support only one side of the debate while refuting the other. Once we separate the two different concepts, there will be no difference of opinion left.

The package deal arises subtly because, in today's mixed economy, institutions called "banks" actually perform more than one function. They are supposed to be safe havens for capital. They are also loan brokers. Throughout most of modern history, "banks" have performed both functions, and in fact both functions have been melded into differing aspects of a single, complicated banking system.

That's probably why the error occurs so naturally and automatically. The two functions have become inextricable from each other in a government-mandated system that tries to have its cake and eat it: to provide 100-per cent guaranteed safety of bank deposits, while employing a fractional reserve method.

The Warehouse Function
One of a "bank's" functions is to be a safe warehouse. This is obviously a valuable function, and in a free market people who desired this service would pay for it. Its analogy in today's world would be a safe-deposit box: a protected stronghold for the storage of valuables, for which the user pays. In a free market, those availing themselves of this "banking" service would deposit their specie in a "bank" where it would be held under lock and key. They would receive, essentially, a warehouse receipt or claim check for it, and in some fashion the service would have to be paid for. The claim checks would then circulate as fully backed money substitutes. This is the image in the minds of the 100-percenters, who nevertheless fear that temptation would lead the "banks" to cheat.

Laws against fraud, however, would prevent this, as applied to this particular banking function. Even in today's market, banks are not allowed to break into private safe-deposit boxes and "borrow" their contents without the owners' consent. The 100-percenters are correct that the same ought to be true in the ideal laissez-faire economy, and for this aspect of banking, the fractional reservers should be able to agree completely. Clearly, stealing from safe deposit boxes is force.

Banking today, however, also entails another completely separate function. Banks act as loan brokers, accepting deposits for which they pay interest instead of getting paid for safe storage. They then lend out these deposits at higher rates and profit from the difference, as well as (and more so) from the creating of deposits via the fractional reserve system.

Today the citizen has no real choice between the two functions. He has nowhere to put his money for safekeeping except into a loan-brokering operation at a bank. (He could put green cash into a safe deposit box, but the inflation engendered by the very system he's trying to avoid precludes this as a sensible option.)

As the fractional reservers; point out, there's nothing wrong with loan-brokering. What's wrong is forcing people to deposit into a loan-brokering scheme by forbidding the alternative, while simultaneously falsely advertising the loan-broker outfit as a safe warehouse. That's what today's banking system does and both sides would agree that it's wrong.

In a free market, both functions ought to be permissible, but clearly defined and separated. This doesn't mean government regulations, but rather legal definitions that distinguish the two concepts, clarify their differences, and serve as the basis for legal redress if and when a loan-brokering operation fraudulently advertises itself as something else, and someone sues.

The 100-percenters want a clean, stable, no-questions-about-it currency that serves the role of money. This they will have without prohibiting the fractional reservers' loan--brokering "bankers." The notes of these loan brokers, in practice, probably will not even circulate as money, but as interest-bearing notes, similar to commercial paper today. If they were clearly identified as a loan-broker's fractionally backed (promissory) notes, then no one would accept them unless the notes paid interest appropriate to the financial risk they entailed. (Remember, it is only the existence of legal tender laws that allow Gresham's Law to work. If people aren't forced to accept bad money, then good money will drive bad money out.)

The 100-percenters can confidently acquiesce in allowing the existence of fractional "loan-brokering" by "banks," knowing that without legal tender laws, these notes will have to show their true colors in the marketplace, as the equivalent of commercial "promissory notes," and never would achieve the status of money. Since a genuine need for safe storage does exist, there will also be someone, somewhere, who issues 100 per cent backed notes for the convenience of his customers, and those pieces of paper will circulate as money, by the natural workings of the market.

In practice, it may well turn out to be most efficient to house these two functions under one roof, but never to blend them into one "system." Just as we have money-market versus bond "switch funds" today, a single institution could offer both services. A cautious citizen might avail himself of only the warehouse facility, where his gold deposits would be physically segregated, and he would pay for this service. If he wanted to lend to industry, he could have some or all of his gold transferred to the other side of the "bank" and accept the risk in return for the interest.

In sum, if we:

a) separate the concept of "banking" into its two distinct functions (warehousing and loan-brokering);

b) recognize this distinction in law, as part of the general body of law on fraud; and

c) eliminate legal tender laws, the result will be a money and credit system that satisfies all the requirements of both camps.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At the time of the original publication, Morris Markovitz was President of a Wall Street management firm.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reprinted with permission from The Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., June 1988, Vol. 38, No. 6.

I think the main problem is the loss of trust between people and their governments. When goverments started, they were one with the people, the government was made by the people and for the people, gradually Satan widened the gap between the two 'sides' untill we have now two enemies instead of one entity!

So for the money issue, i believe if the government is fully operated by the people (day and night, not in voting times only) it should represent the collective decision of the people by establishing one system for money, which by the way i believe to be not a 'product', so we can and should not trade in money, for it's neither productive, nor real, i think it's a form of usury & gambling disguised.

I’m sick of hearing debates about the Constitution! It protects us from government abuse, it’s a social contract, it’s a living document, it’s not a living document...

Who cares? It’s a set of conduct forced on Americans by fiat, no different from any other. It’s simply a matter of degree. Is a government "controlled" by a document such as our Constitution better than one based on Communist ideology? Sure, no debate. But they are similar still because they are both governments; they are both institutionalized force. The very concept of a controlling document, a set of laws to be foisted upon a people in a geographic area by an empowered elite, is so obscene to me that I can see no moral difference between the basis of one government or another. The governments of both Cuba and the United States are equally illegitimate in my eyes.

Now, I wouldn’t mind having a government that actually adhered to the principles in the Constitution, but this is just because it would be a lesser evil. Constitutionality and liberty should not be used as synonyms, just as "freedom from fear’ is not a freedom. Most of the principles in the Constitution are perfectly valid, and are just the outline of the natural rights of men. These need neither moral defense nor codification; they are rights, no matter how and by whom they are enforced. The American Constitution in this instance is redundant, and unnecessary.

But even if America’s founding documents were absolutely flawless in their framing of human rights, how are they to be morally enforced? Since I’m an anarchist, I have to say that no code should be forced on anyone against their will, except to act with decency toward and respect the rights of their neighbors. So the Constitution is again shown to be a redundancy, a scrap of paper used by intellectuals and bureaucrats to control the masses, and which serves as a vessel for the future growth of totalitarianism.

I also believe, as did Lysander Spooner, that the Constitution is not a binding contract. As someone who works in real estate, I know that a contract is not valid without both a signature, and a set of dates (start and finish).

The signature is of incredible importance because in order to be bound by a contract, you need to place yourself in a responsible position, accepting all terms of the contract. No other person can give you a responsibility, you have to place it upon yourself. Therefore, an original signature is required to prove that you have agreed to and are binding yourself to a set of rules, obligations, or principles. The Constitution has not been signed by anyone living today.

A contract must have a start date and an end date in order to be valid. It is impossible to draw out an automatically renewing contract because all binding documents have a time period during which their terms are active. This time period may be from one point in time, to the end of one party’s life, or even beyond. But a period of time for the validity of the contract must be set out. The Constitution has no beginning date and no end date.

The Constitution is invalid. And because it has no date, it didn’t even bind the few men that did sign it.

So knock it off with all the self-righteous blathering about our "lost" Constitution. Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and every other political group is guilty of this stupid parchment-worship.

And even if I agree with many of the principles in the Constitution, this doesn’t mean that we should all be ruled by the edicts of a bunch of rich men from the 18th century. Conservatives and libertarians shouldn’t be agonizing over the Left’s hijacking of the Constitution. By its nature as a government fiat, it is susceptible to perversion by the group whose ideology most relies on the strength of the State.

It’s frightening that the dominant paradigm in the conservative and libertarian movements views the Constitution as the moral value, when it should instead be freedom itself.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sapienza/sapienza16.html

I think Ahmed's point about money, and perhaps "the love of money being the root of all evil" is closer to the point.

Rush, the Gold standard is not the answer. The same people would end up with it eventually. Mises idea of stopping credit creation is uhh like turning off the oxygen to a deep sea diver. If every bank stopped giving out loans, the entire economy would grind to a halt fairly quickly. Wait long enough and mathematically there would be no money in existence. That is because almost all money is credit. Credit + Interest to make it inflationary.

A government regulated monetary system, and one furnished on a >non profit< basis, would not only be far better by eliminating inflation, but has a chance, a chance of being monitored by the public.

Lets assume you have a totalitarian government in power. If they are in charge of supplying the money they can either do a good job or poor job. But at least you know who to blame. If you could vote them out, you have a way to regulate the system.

Our current monetary system is out of our control, and mostly out of any government's control.

Government control of the money supply could be disasterous if you live in North Korea or any totalitarian regime. But that's already the case in large part.

Question: and this would be one a bankster would want to know. Of the Libertarian variety of monetary reforms, how do they deal with government debt? Our current system exists as a way to secure gov't debt in every country. To mask that it also furnishes just enough credit to keep Quasimodo lurching along.

Having a functioning monetary system would be pretty easy for a mildly corrupt government to regulate and manage. I suggest it would lurch along much better than the current model, more like a gov't regulated electricity grid.